THIS DATE, FROM HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S JOURNAL

June 30, 1854

P. M. - Walden and Hubbard’s Close.

Jersey tea. Young oak shoots have grown from one and a half to three or four feet, but now in some cases appear to be checked and a large bud to have formed. Poke, a day or two. Small crypta Elatine, apparently some days at least, at Callitriche Pool. Rubus triflorus berries, some time, - the earliest fruit of a rubus. The berries are very scarce, light (wine?) red, semitransparent, showing the seed, - a few (six to ten) large shining grains and rather acid. Lobelia spicata, to-morrow.

June 29, 1852

In my experience nothing is so opposed to poetry - not crime - as business. It is a negation of life.

June 28, 1854

A. M. - To Island.

Tall anemone.Pontederia to-morrow.

A thunder-shower in the afternoon.

June 26, 1852

I have not put darkness, duskiness, enough into my night and moonlight walks. Every sentence should contain some twilight or night. At least the light in it should be the yellow or creamy light of the moon or the fine beams of stars, and not the white light of day. The peculiar dusky serenity of the sentences must not allow the reader to forget that it is evening or night, without my saying that it is dark. Otherwise he will, of course, presume a daylight atmosphere.

June 25, 1853

Saturday. P. M. - To Assabet Bathing-Place.

Great orange lily beyond stone bridge. Found in the Glade (?) Meadows an unusual quantity of amelanchier berries, - I think of the two common kinds - one a taller bush, twice as high as my head, with thinner and lighter-colored leaves and larger, or at least somewhat softer, fruit, the other a shorter bush, with more rigid and darker leaves and dark-blue berries, with often a sort of woolliness on them. Both these are now in their prime. These are the first berries after strawberries, or the first, and I think the sweetest, bush berries. Somewhat like high blueberries, but not so hard. Much eaten by insects, worms, etc. As big as the largest blueberries or peas. These are the “service-berries” which the Indians of the north and the Canadians use. La poire of the latter (vide Indian books, No. 6, p. 13). They by a little precede the early blueberry (though Holbrook brought two quarts of the last day before yesterday), being now in their prime, while blueberries are but just beginning. I never saw nearly so many before. It is a very agreeable surprise. I hear the cherry-birds and others about me, no doubt attracted by this fruit. It is owing to some peculiarity in the season that they bear fruit. I have picked a quart of them for a pudding. I felt all the while I was picking them, in the low, light, wavy shrubby wood they make, as if I were in a foreign country. Several old farmers say, “Well, though I have lived seventy years, I never saw nor heard of them.” I think them a delicious berry, and no doubt they require only to be more abundant every year to be appreciated.

I think it must be the purple finch, - with the crimson head and shoulders, - which I see and hear singing so sweetly and variedly in the gardens, - one or two to-day. It sits on a bean-pole or fence-pick[et]. It has a little of the martin warble and of the canary-bird.

June 24, 1856

To Sassacowen Pond and to Long Pond.

Common yellow thistle abundant about R.’s; open a good while. Maryland yellow-throats very common in bushes behind his house; nest with young. American holly now in prime. The light-colored masses of mountain laurel were visible across Sassacowen. A kingbird’s nest just completed in an apple tree.

Lunched by the spring on the Brady farm in Freetown, and there it occurred to me how to get clear water from a spring when the surface is covered with dust or insects. Thrust your dipper down deep in the middle of the spring and lift it up quickly straight and square. This will heap up the water in the middle so that the scum will run off.

We were surrounded by whiteweed. The week before I had seen it equally abundant in Worcester (in many fields the flowers placed in one plane would more than cover the surface), and here as there each flower had a dark ring of small black insects on its disk. Think of the many dense white fields between here and there, aye and for a thousand miles around, and then calculate the amount of insect life of one obscure species!

Went off to Nelson’s Island (now Briggs’s) in Long Pond by a long, very narrow bar (fifty rods as I paced it), in some places the water over shoes and the sand commonly only three or four feet wide. This is a noble island, maybe of eight or ten acres, some thirty feet high and just enough wooded, with grass ground and grassy hollows. There was a beech wood at the west end, where R.’s son Walton found an arrowhead when they were here before, and the hemlocks resounded with the note of the tweezer-bird (Sylvia Americana). There were many ephemeræ half dead on the bushes. R. dreams of residing here.

June 23, 1856

To New Bedford with Ricketson.

In R.’s mowing, apparently lucerne, out some days. His son Walton showed me one of four perfectly white eggs taken from a hole in an apple tree eight feet from ground. I examined the hole. He had seen a bluebird there, and I saw a blue feather in it and apparently a bluebird’s nest. Were not these the eggs of a downy woodpecker laid in a bluebird’s nest? They were all gone now.

Bay-wings sang morning and evening about R.’s house, often sitting on a bean-pole and dropping down and running and singing on the bare ground amid the potatoes. Its note somewhat like Come, here here, there there, - quick quick quick (fast), - or I’m gone.

Prinos lœvigatus common and just begun to bloom behind R.’s house.

June 22, 1840

It is odd that people will wonder how Shakespeare could write as he did without knowing Latin, or Greek, or geography, as if these were of more consequence than to know how to whistle. They are not backward to recognize Genius, - how it dispenses with those furtherances which others require, leaps where they crawl, - and yet they never cease to marvel that so it was, - that it was Genius, and helped itself.

June 21, 1855

Saw a white lily in Everett’s Pond.

Sparrow’s nest, four eggs, deep in the moist bank beyond cherry-bird’s nest (have three), of peculiar color. She deserted the nest after one was taken. Outside of stubble, scantily lined with fibrous roots. Clams abundant within three feet of shore, and bream-nests. The early grass is ripe or browned, and clover is drying. Peetweets make quite a noise calling to their young with alarm.

On an apple at R. W. E.’s a small pewee’s nest, on a horizontal branch, seven feet high, almost wholly of hair, cotton without, not incurved at edge; four eggs, pale cream-color.

June 20, 1853

Found two lilies open in the very shallow inlet of the meadow. Exquisitely beautiful, and unlike anything else that we have, is the first white lily just expanded in some shallow lagoon where the water is leaving it, - perfectly fresh and pure, before the insects have discovered it. How admirable its purity! how innocently sweet its fragrance! How significant that the rich, black mud of our dead stream produces the water-lily, - out of that fertile slime springs this spotless purity! It is remarkable that those flowers which are most emblematical of purity should grow in the mud.